The Pre-Season Ramp
It's still the offseason, but time to move from "base" to "build."
In my previous offseason training series, I spent a lot of time going through the different components of my weekly offseason schedule, then very quickly in the final piece of that series tossed in a bit about how that starts shifting in March and April.
Time to get into the details of that transition - from the deep offseason that (for me) usually runs from around November through February, to the ramping segment of the offseason during those early spring months.
By the way: My timeline looks like this because my “A” goals don’t start to arrive until July, and even my secondary goals mostly aren’t coming up until late May. However, for plenty of cyclists, their season starts much earlier, whether that’s an early season ultra like the Race Around Rwanda or Atlas Mountain Race, or a “normal distance” season opener like Mid South, Rough Road 100, or the Skyway Crit Series. If that’s you, this discussion is still relevant, it just might happen a little earlier in the calendar.
Intensity Unlocks the Banked Base Gains
This is going to be a little subjective, though not entirely unscientific.
Some first principles for making gains in endurance training are A) train more days per week, then B) add volume within your endurance zone, so long as C) you aren’t overtraining and wearing yourself down. That’s the scientific part, and it’s why the offseason can be so valuable - you have time to train regularly without the pressures of upcoming races. You can reserve the little bit of high-intensity work you want to do in a polarized training model for weightlifting and the occasional high-intensity bike session. In the oft-used metaphor of a cyclist’s “engine,” you’re making the engine bigger.
I’m a believer in the idea that on-bike intensity “tunes” that larger engine, or said differently, that intensity is what translates the real fitness gains of the offseason into actually riding faster, for longer.
I’ve relayed before how I completely messed this up in 2022 because I hadn’t been exposed to enough of the science behind effective training. That year, I did a TON of long distance, multi-day riding, but I did extraordinarily few fast group rides or interval sessions. The idea was “practice what you want to do.” And there’s merit to training that’s specific to your goals!
But because I never practiced riding fast, I could hold about 25kph all day yet struggled to go any faster than that for any length of time.
Of course, speed isn’t often the goal in bikepacking or randonneuring, but the strength to go fast is absolutely relevant. If you are able to hold 28, 30, 32kph in endurance or tempo zones instead of redlining your heart rate to reach those speeds, it’s probably going to be a lot easier to hold 24-28kph day in and day out. And hey, even if you aren’t racing, who’s going to pass up going a little bit faster for the same volume of training?
For the last couple years, I’ve had an inflection point in my offseason where I shifted from nearly all endurance rides to a mix that still prioritized the offseason base, but added in regular interval sessions in order to start building that base into functional speed and endurance.
And guess what? The first few of these suuuuuuuck!!!
And then my body sort of throws a switch and says, “Oh yeah, I remember how to do this,” and quickly I start going faster. The interval sessions remain intense, but they quickly stop being sufferfests. Adding a bit more on-bike intensity makes us faster, stronger, and more enduring come summer when we really want to do some crazy adventures.
The March and April Weekly Plan
Through January and February, I’ve done an interval session about once every two weeks.
In March and April, that’s going to kick up to once a week, which to be honest is about the frequency I’ll maintain for the rest of the year (though later I’ll also allow some long sessions to move into Tempo zone, moving to a bit of a pyramidal intensity structure). I’m still an endurance cyclist, not a crit racer, after all.
The question, then, is how I fit this "extra” (compared to Jan/Feb) workout into my schedule.
The cheating answer is that I’m simply going to take less rest in the week. If I’ve most often taken two rest days per week until now, I’m going to try to go down to one and see how my body (and mind) tolerate that.
Realistically, though, this is at best half the answer. Yes, if I’ve been working out an average of 4-5 days per week until now I’m going to try to up that to a consistent 5-6 from this point, but that is a very full schedule. I’ll also be adding in more volume on the bike as the weather allows me to get outdoors more regularly; that’s another training stress that I’ll have to account for.
So to allow the consistent high intensity session, I’m pulling from two other places.
Cross-training (Non-Bike) Endurance - this will almost entirely be going away, except perhaps as an extra low intensity 6th day a week when I don’t quite need a rest day but don’t have 2+ hours to commit to a ride.
Shorter weightlifting session(s) - if the majority of my training intensity came in the gym during the base part of the offseason, it makes sense to reduce some intensity here if I’m increasing it elsewhere.
That second one is a little bit tougher since I’m not quite ready to scale back unless I’m trading it for a lot more time on the bike, but as the spring comes it might just happen anyways.
All together, though, my weekly schedule will look something like this:
SUNDAY
Weights
Modified as needed to be shorter or focus on stability (rather than heavy lifts) OR blended with a short cross training session OR taken as a full rest day
MONDAY
Bike Intervals
TUESDAY
Low Intensity Bike Endurance
WEDNESDAY
Weights
THURSDAY
Low Intensity Bike Endurance
FRIDAY
Rest Day
SATURDAY
Long Endurance Ride
As it has been til now, this is just a rough template that can be flexible to my schedule, especially as the weather (hopefully) improves and I have more options on the weekend. Maybe I’ll be able to go bikepacking some weekend in March! Maybe I’ll jump in on a weekly group ride! All this can be adjusted, but by laying it out I know the general balance of workouts that I’m shooting for.
I’ll be kicking this off this part of my offseason with an FTP test this week to check in on where I’ve come since the start of January and make sure the added intensity is properly calibrated. This part of my offseason will then bring me up to the start of what you might call my season proper. At that point I’ll be trying to implement some specific periodized training blocks.
There’s a good chance pieces of this will change as I go - a few years in, I’m still figuring out how best to balance training against other commitments, and I don’t expect that to change. But I’m getting better at it. And I still love being on my bike.
Which, as always, is what all of this is about.